To really get the Pitchers and the strange and striking success of their Wolf Creek Ski Area in the high lonesome of Colorado's San Juan Range, you need to spend some time with a man born 170 years ago and 6,000 miles from Wolf Creek.

This, at any rate, is the belief of the 91-year-old family patriarch, Kingsbury ("Pitch") Pitcher. Before he says a word about Wolf Creek, Pitch wants to speak of his ancestry—"I can do it in about one minute."

He takes 10 minutes, but nobody's counting. The man, who skied regularly through his mid-80s, is a wonder of nonagenarian focus and vigor. And it's as if he reads from a book, a good one, about the life and deeds of his maternal grandfather, Otto Mears.

Mears, a Russian-born orphan, landed in San Francisco all on his own and penniless at age 11. Pitch waxes biblical: "He worked ever since then...and the years passed." Mears went to Colorado and remade the southwestern part of the state by building toll roads, which he upgraded to railroads networking wilderness settlements and mining towns. A stained-glass portrait of Mears, still widely known as the Pathfinder of the San Juans, adorns the rotunda of Colorado's state capitol...